Chase Dittrich author page

Jim here, sitting in for Jeff Chen, who's getting his tarot cards read.

Rules? What rules?

Puzzles of all kinds have rules, but an odd property of crosswords is that the rules are secret. You figure them out by playing the game. How do you know that puzzles get more difficult as the week progresses? Or that wordplay outweighs strict definitions? Or that clue/answer tenses must match? Or that answers might involve multi-word phrases, writing more than one letter in a square, or entering answers backward? We often get angry email from solvers encountering such tricks for the first time. These learned conventions make regular solvers feel like they're part of a fun secret society, but they can be frustrating for new solvers.

Fortunately, early-week themed puzzles often have an explanation answer called a revealer that "justifies" the apparent nonsense. Not today!

Mr. Dittrich gives us four phrases where the first word of each hides in circled letters in the remaining words. We learn by playing the game that the four long answers make sense when you extract the word spelled in the circles and prepend it to the initial phrase. It's not explained, but it's a good gimmick because you know it's correct once you figure it out.

Does it feel inelegant that two of the four raw theme answers can stand alone and two can't? I imagine it's challenging to find phrases that fit this puzzle's rules. Of course, solvers don't care how hard the crossword is to construct any more than audiences at a magic show care how technically difficult the effect is, but these are questions that constructors and editors chew pencils over.

Matisse at MOMA (51-Down) continues through to Sep. 10.